Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993 TAG: 9301150297
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Excerpts from "The Measure of Our Success," by Marian Wright Edelman,
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
LESSONS FOR LIFE
An open letter to all of America. A timely message of hope and purpose. A moving reminder about what we once seemed to know well: that service to others is simply the rent we pay for living."As my firstborn son Joshua approached his 21st birthday, I thought for many months about what I could give him and his brothers, Jonah and Ezra, as they cross the threshold of adulthood. The following lessons life has taught me - a spiritual and family dowry - is a response that came to me."
Lesson 1: There is no free lunch. Don't feel entitled to anything you don't sweat and struggle for. And help our nation understand that it's not entitled to world leadership based on the past or on what we say rather than how well we perform and meet changing world needs. Every African American, Latino, Asian American and Native American youth needs to remember that he or she never can take anything for granted in America - especially now as racial intolerance resurges all over our land. Although it may be wrapped up in new euphemisms and better etiquette, as Frederick Douglass warned, it's the same old snake.
\ Lesson 2: Set goals and work quietly and systematically toward them. We must all try to resist quick-fix, simplistic answers and easy gains, which often disappear just as quickly as they come.
\ Lesson 3: Assign yourself. My daddy used to ask us whether the teacher had given us any homework. If we said no, he'd say, "Well, assign yourself." Don't wait around for your boss or your co-worker or spouse to direct you to do what you are able to figure out and do for yourself. Don't do just as little as you can to get by. If someone asks you to do A, and B and C obviously need to be done as well, do them without waiting to be asked or expecting a Nobel prize for doing what is needed. Too often today too many ordinary, thoughtful deeds are treated as extraordinary acts of valor.
\ Lesson 4: Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or build a decent family or help you sleep at night. We are the richest nation on earth, yet our incarceration, drug addiction and child poverty rates are among the highest in the industrialized world. Don't condone or tolerate moral corruption whether it's found in high or low places, whatever its color. It is not OK to push or use drugs even if every person in America is doing it. It is not OK to cheat or lie even if countless corporate or public officials and everybody you know do. Be honest. And demand that those who represent you be honest.
\ Lesson 5: Don't be afraid of taking risks or of being criticized. An anonymous sage said, "If you don't want to be criticized, don't say anything, do anything or be anything." Don't be afraid of failing. It's the way you learn to do things right. It doesn't matter how many times you fall down. What matters is how many times you get up. And don't wait for everybody else before you to do something. It's always a few people who get things done and keep things going. This country needs more wise and courageous shepherds and fewer sheep.
\ Lesson 6: Take parenting and family life seriously and insist that those you work for and who represent you do. Our leaders mouth family values they do not practice. As a result, our children lag behind the children of other nations on key child indicators like infant mortality, poverty and family supports. Seventy nations provide medical care and financial assistance to all pregnant women; we aren't one of them. Seventeen industrialized nations have paid maternity leave programs; we are not one of them. In 1990 our president vetoed and the business community opposed - and continues to oppose - an unpaid parental leave bill to enable parents to stay home when a child is born, adopted or sick. More than half of mothers of infants are in the labor force. Yet too many men in Congress and in the White House still are bickering about whether we can afford funding guarantees for Head Start to get all eligible poor children ready for school.
Men should not father children until they are able and willing to be responsible for the consequences of childbearing. And all men - young and old, rich, middle and lower income, and poor - should be held accountable for supporting their children. It is shameful that only a small percentage of divorced and unmarried fathers provide any regular child support.
\ Lesson 7: Remember that your wife is not your mother or your maid, but your partner and friend. I hope you will raise your sons to be fair to your own and to other people's daughters and to share - not just help with - parenting and household responsibilities. My parents did not have differing expectations for their girls and boys and always encouraged each of us to reach the limits of our capacities and put them to useful service. My brothers cleaned and made up beds as my sister and I did, and I learned how to wax cars and change tires as they did. I played with cars and trains far more than dolls and still can't sew worth a dime - a fact that does not make me proud. Young men need to take the responsibility for seeing and figuring out what needs to be done at home - just as you do at your job.
\ Lesson 8: Forming families is serious business. It requires a measure of thoughtful planning, economic stability and commitment, particularly with the downward spiral of wages and job opportunities for young families of all races and with the rising costs of good child care and housing, which often require more than one employed parent.
Parenting is not only a big economic commitment - the cost of raising a child to age 18 is more than $114,000, not including savings for college and ignoring future inflation -it is also an enormous emotional and personal commitment. I lost my father at 14 and my mother at 45. I still feel both their losses deeply. Nobody told me how hard it is not to be somebody's child - to be an orphan - even as an adult. The personal and national consequences of hundreds of thousands of runaway and throwaway children, boarder babies, and of children shunted about in out-of-home care, as well as the legacy of countless parents of privilege who have emotionally abandoned their children for money, personal pleasure or work - and of those parents who are stressed daily beyond the limits of survival by joblessness, homelessness and other family tragedy and isolation - is a terrible story just unfolding. How many children are turning to gangs and cults and drugs and too-early sex to find what they cannot find at home?
\ Lesson 9: Be honest. Struggle to live what you say and preach. Call things by their right names. Be moral examples for your children. If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will, too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.
I hope you will help strengthen the American tradition of family by stressing family rituals: prayers if you are religious, and if not, regular family meals and gatherings. All children need constructive alternatives to the streets and violence, to drugs - including alcohol, killer tobacco and too-early sex as antidotes to boredom and drift.
\ Lesson 10: Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society. Be decent and fair and insist that others be so in your presence. Don't tell, laugh at, or in any way acquiesce to racial, ethnic, religious or gender jokes or to any practices intended to demean rather than enhance another human being. Walk away from them. Stare them down. Make them unacceptable in your homes, religious congregations, and clubs.
Through daily moral consciousness counter the proliferating voices of racial and ethnic and religious divisions that are gaining respectability over the land, including on college campuses. Let's face up to rather than ignore our growing racial problems, which are America's historical and future Achilles' heel. Universal Press Syndicate